


sunken stone

by soltian



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Bondage, Dubious Consent, F/F, Psychological Trauma, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:05:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4272909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soltian/pseuds/soltian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lapis's winding thoughts twist through many different territories, and land on Jasper's beauty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sunken stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mattatoio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mattatoio/gifts).



On Earth she had had very little to occupy her mind. She deteriorated mentally for a century and built herself back up when she had practically lost language itself.

a. b. c. d.

She began to speak human language exclusively, and her communication with the cosmos became rusty. She mumbled the names of Homeworld’s cities and rivers in clumsy Earthling syllables for hours each night, to remind herself they were out there.

Back then, she liked to think they were waiting for her.

They had been so fond of her when she was new, and she had betrayed them with curiosity and adventure. Never a soldier, never destined for the fleet, she had nonetheless wanted to explore, to see other worlds. With the help of water and uncanny stealth she snuck past the military guard to seize the galaxy warp and all the stars she had not yet seen.

Oh, disaster.

 

* * *

 

She was traveling backwards in a ship made up as the Hand of God. Yellow Diamond had vaporized the rivers and paved each green field, and White Diamond sat atop a throne made of her enemy’s shards. There was grotesque elegance to the Great Four now...

 

_Aztec queens_

_Blood sacrifice_

_Should they not wear shards through their nostrils and shattered gems like discs in their ears?_

_No, no. Earth customs. Earth propaganda. Earth films._

 

Still, it was easy to see why Jasper worshiped them so slavishly. War had always been celebrated, but such a brutish golem of a gem would have been set aside for the front lines, restricted to raising battlements, hauling boulders. Destined to die with bile in her lungs when enough of the enemy’s spears finally pierced her thick hide.

Jasper, an officer.

An _escort._

When Peridot introduced them, she couldn’t stop herself - she laughed. It wasn’t a loud noise, barely distinguishable as mirth, really. The snort congested her eyes and nose and bubbled out as one puff of the mass hysteria she had been fighting down ever since alighting on the smooth glass that was once her favorite forest.

 

_Centuries of waiting_

_Her lungs lead in her chest from the effort of weeks of flying_

_What was she doing here? What was she doing anywhere?_

 

This ridiculous lump of a gem brought her at last to the present. Here was something ironic and amusing, at least. Something so bizarre that she couldn’t help but keep her eyes on it. It didn’t take kindly to mockery, however, and she found herself with a blood-red fist around her throat and teeth as large as a bear’s in her face.

“Jasper, _no!_ ” Peridot hissed before the mountain of muscle even had a chance to verbalize her offense. “We need to _get along_. Lapis is the one who knows the most about Earth.”

Jasper snarled, and Lapis sagged in her grip. Breathing was out of the question, so her brief laughter ceased. The energy drained from her, and she leveled Jasper a glare devoid of life. Satisfied, Jasper shoved Lapis to the ground, and Peridot clicked her tongue and teeth in rapid irritation, gesturing awkwardly for Lapis to stand. Later Lapis would realize that it was a grossly affectionate move for Peridot. For her to show concern for someone’s well-being was rare, and an offer of physical contact was out of the question.

She was given nothing to do on the ship. Peridot’s dismissal of her offer to help was flat and final.

“Stop being nosy. I’m in control here.”

Jasper was allowed the same idleness, but reveled in it. She smuggled aboard indecent novelties from every port they paused in, everything from meat to religious totems to live females, each of which she did her best to enjoy before Peridot could catch her, or else her treasures would be ejected from the waste chute as their Hand of God shot ever onward.

“Loosen up,” Jasper growled, while Peridot calibrated an inactive engine for what Lapis had counted as the twelfth time. “I would have tossed her in another couple of lightyears myself after I was finished. I’m a _lieutenant_ , not your servant. You can’t steal from me.”

Lapis sat on the floor outside the control room and pressed her cheek to the ship’s wall. It was warm, at least, and soft like flesh. Peridot was hissing something, and Jasper was drowning her out with loud barks and snarls.

Jasper had the raw appetite of a caged predator, but was quite good at managing her frustrations with the fuel-station tokens. Peridot had taken those away, and Lapis could now feel hot eyes on her back. The ship was getting smaller. Jasper’s teeth were getting longer.

 _Soon_ , Lapis thought to herself. _Tonight, I’d bet_.

She changed rooms, just for the hell of it. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of chambers to choose from.

 _It should be Peridot_ , she thought, surprising herself with ire as heavy footsteps approached, and Jasper’s gruff voice called out her name. _She’s the one that doesn’t know how to keep an animal. Why should I have to take care of her pet._

 

_But then_

_Careful, Lapis. It’s almost as if you’re about to scream “it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair”._

 

Jasper filled her doorway, which she hadn’t bothered to seal. Her eyes and gem glowed in the green dim, and Lapis had to admit, despite everything, that she was truly lovely. No delicacy existed in any part of her, her every edge and contour were heavy and rough, and wasn’t that just the thing, too.

“You were waiting for me,” Jasper purred. Lapis didn’t pretend to be pleased, but she did hold a hand out for her, and found herself lifted like smoke in her thick arms. Her fingers were suddenly everywhere and her teeth did as they pleased, so she sunk her own blue fingers into a sea of white fur.

“There was nothing else to do.”

Giving up is a strange process when you’re essentially strong. When you’ve lost, you tell yourself that it’s over, you even tell yourself to die, once in a while. Break. Move on.  
  
_If you keep at it, keep flaunting your strength, you’ll only hurt worse, only eat yourself away the same fashion the world does, and isn’t_ that _just_

_utterly_

_Unfair?_

Giving up in Jasper’s arms should have been easy, but she was rough, and crude, and warm, and hungry, and so many things that could have been _good_ , might have been _sublime_. Before long Lapis was scowling, clawing, kicking, and Jasper rewarded her by slamming her down belly-first, holding her thin arms held tight against her rump while she ran her hot tongue between her shoulder blades.

“Pathetic.”

Lapis managed a growl, then found voice enough to mutter (to the sheets, not to Jasper’s distracted ears, to herself,)

“What does that make you? What does that make _you_? What does that make...you.” 

 

* * *

 

Despite her best efforts, her fury did not abate. Fear and fury coexist so lovingly, two legless wolves embracing each other by way of their teeth through the other’s skull.

 

* * *

 

And then there was Steven.

She had glimpsed his mother, eons ago. A strong, proud, powerful warlord she was, who set Earth apart from all other planets in the universe because it had these creatures - these humans. She loved humans so deeply and so intensely that she gave up her society, her rank, her homeworld, her very identity as a gem -

 _Crystal_ gem! Incredible! You couldn’t turn sandstone into diamond by changing its name!

She had respected Rose Quartz. Feared her. But never understood her, never even attempted to.

Steven…

 

_Rose! Why do you look like that?_

 

Steven...was...something else entirely.

She had been sick, the first moment she realized it. Am I going to become like Rose? She had paused mid-flight, her eyes nearly closed with anxiety. Then the nausea lifted, and she flew on.

I am Lapis Lazuli. I am myself. I love my home.

I have a human friend.

 

* * *

 

And next, the ocean.

Jasper tore at her, clawed her chest, bit whatever she could find, screamed and gnashed and howled her fury, and Lapis felt hot pleasure for what felt like the very first time.

 

_How beautiful her screams are. How gratifying her rage._

 

All that was left was to keep her there, to stay pinioned for as long as this planet could survive. For that she would need to disentangle rage from fear, and instead make fear the master.

 

* * *

 

She wanted so badly to commit herself to Malachite she didn’t realize they were coming apart until it was too late. It was hard to distinguish the taste of her terrors - that Jasper would escape and hurt Steven, that she would come away from the fusion a corroded shell, no longer Lapis Lazuli. Her strength had been waning hour by hour, and it seemed the harder she tried to stitch them back together, the more the choice was being made for her.

 

_Nothing new here, traitor._

_No one’s asked you permission once in your life._

 

She didn’t expect Jasper to be the one utterly spent. Her screams had been so relentless, her prying so painful, her teeth such a burn while they were fused that she hadn’t even considered the possibility. When Malachite ceased to be and they were tiny individuals beneath fifteen thousand pounds of water, Lapis shook, and trembled, and shed tears, but stood. Jasper lay slumped against the rock she had been thrown to, eyes closed, unmoving.

She sat for hours, fists clenched, watching her. It was no bluff, no trick. There wasn’t even a stream of bubbles to show that life still burned in the mass of her. Lapis approached cautiously, her own strength restored somewhat by the rest, and stood over her, close enough to touch. Jasper remained prone, her face lacking flush, her eyes closed, her limbs limp.

With a gentle gesture, Lapis began summoning chains - the most natural form she knew. She bound Jasper’s wrists and ankles and then, tossing the lengths over her shoulder, dragged her deadweight through the sand, aimless til she came to a ravine, aimless still til she came to a strangely waterless chamber inside of it where she felt completely cut off from the human world.

Where she was, humanity was unwelcome.

 

* * *

 

There was a marked difference between Jasper’s loveliness on the ship and her beauty at the bottom of the ocean. She still looked the same - square jaw, wild mane, sunset skin, and thick limbs. Taking this in on Homeworld or on the ship gave her palpitations, cold sweat at the nape of her neck and between her fingers. The nervous awareness that she might pounce at any time.

Now she could stand away from her, and breathe, and take in how her handiwork had modified her. Jasper was breathing visibly now, but still unconscious. Lapis had attached the chains bearing her arms to the roof of the cave, allowing her body to sit against the wall, like a prisoner in an Earth film.

Lapis felt sweat break out on her neck, warm. Her knees were warm. Her thighs were warm. Her chest was warm. Her eyes, which she had squinted in exhaustion for weeks, widened in slow, fascinated blinks.

 

_There is captor, and then there is predator. There is jailor, and there is corruption. It matters to him which one you are._

 

So she sat, and watched, and did not move.

She could bear it while Jasper was insensible.

And then her yellow eyes opened.


End file.
